The Changing of the Guard
KINGSBURY, ROGER
LYNDON JOHNSON TAKES OVER The Changing of the Guard By Roger Kingsbury ON the evening of August 27th Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, will officially accept...
...They will be in the midst of the back-breaking hustle and bustle of the campaign...
...And, on the surface at least, custom will be observed...
...The President waving to the crowds in Atlantic City from the regal heights of a balcony will at last be on his own...
...President Johnson has played this side of the "Kennedy business," as one of his close aids calls it, gingerly and with maximum shrewdness...
...The position of Lyndon Johnson at this convention, if not quite of papal magnitude, is indeed imposing...
...But the real change which Johnson's nomination heralds is more than one of style, for in Atlantic City the custodian of the New Frontier will be publicly transformed into the guardian of the Great Society...
...Somebody threw out the warning that the movie could start a groundswell for Bobby," says one advisor who was present, "and that was that...
...The imperative confronting the President in an election year is to project a persuasive image of his own...
...Many of the hangers-on who came to serve in the New Frontier have gravitated toward Ted Kennedy's office and the Justice department with a purposeless regularity...
...He will be firmly in command of the party and its machinery...
...And the impact of the Kennedy film on the convention will have no bearing on the outcome of the Vice Presidential nomination...
...The President, who is anything but an altruist, has chosen to go along with the Kennedy vim, vigor and vitality at the organizational level of his campaign...
...All that will be missing is the spectacle of Bobby Kennedy preceding the President onto the balcony and announcing to the throng: "We have a new pope...
...The Kennedy trump cards are their experience in the 1960 campaign, their superb organizational abilities, and their close ties with big city Democratic chieftans...
...Others are less convinced, and claim to detect a deep-rooted jealousy of Kennedy's more agile brain and sense of grace...
...For the moment the Kennedy forces have made their peace with God and Lyndon...
...On the day after the election the Kennedy forces remaining at their political posts will be few indeed...
...A plaza outside of the Convention Hall will be named in his honor...
...But he has pointedly left all of the decisionmaking to Bill Moyers and another trusted aide...
...Meanwhile his party's nomination frees him at last from the Kennedy shadow he finds so stultifying...
...But the picture will have a different ending this time...
...Yet no one close to the President will admit that the decision concerning the Kennedy film was his...
...The familiar picture of a young Irishman whispering into the phone after a sleepless night will be repeated this year, as it was in 1960...
...A burial is a time for deference to the family of the deceased...
...Resentments will submerge for the time being...
...The fact is that President Kennedy is gone— not forgotten, but gone—and so is the political muscle of his devoted following...
...In practical political terms, however, Johnson's subjective opinion of Kennedy may be beside the point...
...The Bobby thing" was indeed behind the rescheduling of the movie...
...Yet the maneuvering among Democratic officials over the scheduling of the Kennedy film is a dramatic reminder that the transformation of the party into a Johnson vehicle is no simple matter...
...But the significance of the Kennedy film and the memorial to the fallen President is readily apparent to even the casual observer of Democratic party politics...
...Because the President is relatively humorless, however, his style will be heavy-handed, and the wry jests of his predecessor, which could snap an adversary's verbal spear in mid-flight, will be sadly missed...
...The truth is probably somewhere in between...
...How to conduct this burial service has been preoccupying the principal undertakers for some time now...
...He is scheduled to grapple with Senator Goldwater, probably beginning on Labor Day, on his own terms, defending his own record, choosing his own stance on the issues...
...Now it has been moved to the end...
...The Bobby thing had the White House in a tizzy...
...The New Frontier, mortally wounded last November, has had to wait until August for a decent burial...
...Lyndon Johnson's hero is Franklin Roosevelt, not John F. Kennedy...
...In robust health, at the prime of life, the Chief Executive has every reason to expect to reign eight more years as the most powerful man on earth...
...Only decision-makers receive big pay-offs in politics...
...It will all be in good fun and good politics as well as good drama in what is otherwise expected to be an unexciting convention...
...President Johnson, it is safe to assume, has directed the major planning for the convention and has personally chosen the key personnel who will be officiating...
...And this they aim to do, even if tomorrow is a long time away...
...Thus the relevance of Johnson's attitude and the hard feelings it triggers will, in any event, be swamped during the fevered activities of the election campaign...
...For the convention, with all the hoopla and oratory, marks the real finale of those brief and brilliant days historians will remember as The New Frontier...
...After obtaining assurances from each of the networks that the film would be shown...
...Until that distant day the Kennedy forces are a political anachronism in Washington...
...Johnson's response to the Goldwater challenge is expected to be much the same as Kennedy's would have been: low-geared, dignified, avoiding personal head-on attacks...
...Then, in jovial procession, he will walk onto the balcony of Atlantic City's Convention Hall to receive the cheers of the multitude waiting in the darkness below...
...Many of the Kennedy appointees in Federal government have begun leaving or, if not, are beginning to think about it...
...A truce is only a truce...
...But films can be re-run...
...Johnson has done some of both, yet the Presidential office will not fully be his until he receives the public's mandate in November...
...From now until the people decide his fate at the polls...
...For them, there is no future in "Lyndon Land," as they ruefully call it...
...The brilliant and dynamic young men who surrounded the late President in the White House have already departed, leaving the lesser lights to hold on as long as they can...
...President Johnson's post-election view is, on the other hand, bright indeed...
...Woodrow Wilson once remarked that "some persons in Washington grow in office while others only swell...
...All inquiries are referred to the Democratic National Committee...
...And indeed, one of the last impediments to his well-being will be removed when he separates himself from the stewardship of the Kennedy administration and begins his own era as guardian of the nation's affairs...
...The Kennedy forces have thus been given a temporary lease on political life...
...Cliff Carter...
...The fact is," says one official who suffered throughout the long ordeal, "no one decision concerning this convention was more agonized over than the film...
...And a national TV audience will watch a truly memorable documentary film on the late President...
...For their trouble they received an angry rebuke from Bill Moyers, the President's closest political advisor, who declared that all signals concerning the Kennedy film were off...
...Several months ago the word was given that the Kennedy film would open the convention...
...Lyndon Johnson is truly his own man...
...President Kennedy will be respectfully memorialized...
...He will be out of the Kennedy orbit—a solitary figure who voluntarily links himself with the Kennedy tradition but never fails to include the names of Truman and Roosevelt and Wilson in the same breath...
...And the proper memorial to the fallen President in the form of swearing new allegiance to his programs, policies and visions for the future will not come to pass at this convention...
...LYNDON JOHNSON TAKES OVER The Changing of the Guard By Roger Kingsbury ON the evening of August 27th Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, will officially accept his party's nomination and thus bring the 1964 Democratic National Convention to a political and emotional climax...
...In an historical as well as a showbusiness sense, the end in this case seems to justify the means, for Johnson will not so much be nominated as coronated in Atlantic City...
...Everyone knows that the Kennedys are loyal to their friends...
...It will also be a novel way to help President Johnson celebrate his 56th birthday, which, by some strange quirk of fate, happens to fall on the very same evening he makes his acceptance speech to the party's 34th convention...
...Roger Kingsbury, a free-lance journalist, lives in Washington, D.C...
...One can see, however, that they have not forgotten the cardinal rule of their faith, the maxim of Massachusetts politics: "Don't Get Mad, Get Even...
...Democratic officials dutifully reported back to the White House that all was arranged...
...The debts owed to members of the Kennedy team will be small...
...Against the advice of some of his long-time Texas associates, he has refrained from purging the Kennedy forces from the National Committee and has, in fact, brought more of them into important campaign posts...
...Those who have been close enough to the President to fathom his attitude toward Kennedy swear to Johnson's abiding devotion to all the Bostonian stood for...
Vol. 47 • August 1964 • No. 16
